Footnote

c In History of the Jews, Professor Graetz says that the Romans sometimes impaled 500 prisoners a day. Other captured Jews had their hands cut off and then were sent back into the city. What conditions prevailed there? “Money had lost its value, for it could not purchase bread. Men fought desperately in the streets over the most loathsome and disgusting food, a handful of straw, a piece of leather, or offal thrown to the dogs. . . . The rapidly increasing number of unburied corpses made the sultry summer air pestilential, and the populace fell a prey to sickness, famine, and the sword.”